The moral fallacy:
Powers, Thomas
THE MORAL FALLACY NUCLEAR WAR MAKES OUR DIFFERENCES PALE Be England what she will. With all her faults she is my country still "The Farewell" Charles Churchill (1731-1764) THE OTHER DAY - it was...
...Doubtless they feel the same way, and what of that...
...Q.: What about the purges...
...The infamous White Paper, limiting Jewish immigration at the very moment of Hitler's rise, and the intrigues of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, seemed especially significant...
...They judged their country, but would not abandon her...
...He had been going through a period of intense melancholy, common, to people when they first begin to think hard about nuclear weapons...
...Both pale beside what we have prepared to do to each other, in the name of defense...
...General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, once told a colleague that within weeks of taking on the job he was convinced that "Russia was our enemy and...
...Before it was over Virgil was visibly squirming in his seat...
...There is no single thread of justice...
...Since this fellow admitted to a background in security work, Alan began to wonder if he was the agent in question...
...A tall, lean, good-looking man of forty or so asked him - not once, but several times - if he thought he could spot the government agents who were taking pictures and writing down names...
...In large part they blamed themselves - they had been too confident after the Six Day War in 1967, they couldn't make up their minds about the West Bank, they were too unbending with the Palestinians, they relied too heavily on arms...
...The earlier groups tended toward a faint disapproval of the later, as if they didn't quite grasp what it was all about, or exhibit the proper demeanor, or share the same degree of commitment...
...It is not anger at what Russia has done which explains the Cold War from the Western point of view, but fear of what Russia is...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...They're on their side, and we're on purs...
...This was purely a difference in character...
...I ONCE SPENT THE better part of a year trying to figure out why the Arabs and the Israelis could not make peace...
...Q.: What about fifty thousand tanks in Eastern Europe...
...Allen Dulles, chief of the OSS office in Berne, Switzerland, told a friend he began to switch the focus of his concern from Germany to Russia after the battle of Stalingrad, when it became clear Hitler could no longer win...
...My technique was to read history, paying close attention to' the details...
...It was a Jewish invasion from the beginning, the land must be returned to its rightful owners, and there was no more to be said about it...
...It said nothing about who was on which side...
...Q.: What about the kulaks...
...In Waterbury, about noon, the marchers all filed into a local church where they were to be addressed by a Russian arms control expert, Yuri Kapralov, who had been sent by the Soviet embassy in Washington...
...He just turned the audience around his finger...
...Kapralov was a youngish man with black hornrimmed glasses and a good command of English despite a pronounced accent...
...A.: What about the neutron bomb...
...Some of these were crimes all right - especially the Athenian massacre of a recalcitrant ally - but Thucydides claims the real cause was Sparta's fear of growing Athenian power...
...It had been a practiced performance all right, but what else was he to do...
...Questions had been piling up in his mind: What about Sakharov...
...Several things had struck him...
...Most of the questions were friendly, although a few offered Kapralov an opportunity to defend or justify the total absence of independent peace groups in Russia - an opportunity he, for the most part gracefully, declined...
...A.: What about "the last best hope of mankind...
...From this exercise I learned one useful thing - nobody is right...
...Gulag, Lubyanka, Siberia...
...He clearly knew the language and issues of strategic arms debate in Washington but his talk skirted most of the details and centered on Russia's desire for arms agreements, its equanimity with the idea of a freeze, and its vivid memory of the horrors of World War II...
...You can't add up all the violence, the honest and dishonest acts, the atrocities and herpjc sacrifices...
...Q.: What about Khrushchev, "We will bury you...
...It is the same with Russia and America...
...I asked him what he thought...
...As we walked along in the drizzle under umbrellas, herded well to the side of the road by marshals from the American Friends Service Committee, Alan told us his adventures of the previous two days...
...Q What about Poland, Hungary, o o Czechoslovakia...
...They disagreed with each other about the proper form of socialism to be established in Palestine after the liberation, but on every other point they were unanimous...
...Enmity between nations is more mysterious than that...
...Q.: What about the SS-20...
...A.: What about the Negroes...
...It may settle things from time to time but it does not discriminate...
...Q.: What about Sakharov...
...the project was conducted on that basis...
...Q.: What about Masaryk...
...He had been seeing things with new eyes - the cities which might be destroyed, the green earth which might be poisoned, his own children who were hostage in a global confrontation...
...It was an extraordinary performance in the act of self-criticism, the more striking after two weeks in Beirut listening to Palestinians...
...I did not neglect the massacre at Deir or the bombing of the King David Hotel...
...All continued to serve 60-90 days a year on active duty, and all were ready to fight again...
...A.: What about Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, free-fire zones, Agent Orange...
...I followed the postwar diplomatic maneuvering which led to British withdrawal and UN support for an independent Israel...
...But war is not an instrument of judgment...
...Another friend, Alan R., had been on the march with two of his sons, age seven and nine, since the beginning...
...But when Kapralov stuck to those very things, the vagaries of peace, it made Virgil mad...
...The history of the place is not a history of wrongs and rights - something you can judge - but a history of two entities in collision...
...What would happen to Poland if we had no theater nuclear forces in Europe...
...So have we all...
...In time, as still tardier arrivals appeared on the scene, the distinctions faded away...
...The Palestinians all seemed to have read the same book...
...What about Afghanistan...
...Richard Russell, "If we have to start over again from Adam, I want to be sure he's an American...
...Kapralov's every friendly word - skirting all the difficult questions - just made Virgil madder and madder...
...The marchers were all damp from the drizzle and the church was crowded, hot, and steamy...
...The Soviet Union has indeed done many terrible things...
...After a day or two living in the open you tended to be festooned with gear - canteen over a shoulder, things stuck in your belt, a headband to keep the sweat out of your eyes, odd buttons pinned here and there, walking stick, etc., etc...
...Virgil and I arrived just as the marchers were setting out on the penultimate leg of their walk to Waterbury, a distance of 3.2 miles...
...This was not the inevitable friction of allies but something much deeper, a Western fear of Russian size, appetite, and "backwardness" - the city-man's fear of a sullen, barbarian horde - which goes back deep into the nineteenth century...
...A.: What about Lumumba...
...Someone once said that history is the record of crimes...
...At the start of The Peloponnesian War Thucydides cites but rejects the popular explanation of the war, based on various crimes of Sparta and Athens...
...Throughout World War II in Washington and London there was a kind of muttering undertone of hostility toward Russia, a State Department-Whitehall alarm, deep in the bowels of bureaucracy, that Stalin was no less a threat than Hitler...
...ONE AFTERNOON IN 1975, in a farmhouse not far from the Sea of Galilee, I spent a couple of hours listening to a roomful of Israelis try to explain their country's failure to make peace with the Arabs...
...General George Patton wanted to drive right on to Russia in 1945...
...Slick propaganda," he said...
...THIS SORT OF THING will get US nowhere.,When it is used to explain the Cold War, it is fundamentally dishonest...
...Since both countries are engaged in a rapid strategic arms buildup, the proposal of a freeze, seemingly a cautious one, is actually quite radical...
...The marchers' goal is an American-Soviet nuclear weapons freeze...
...A.: What about Pershing, GLCMs, SLCMs, ALCMs...
...Q.: What about Hafizullah Amin...
...A.: What about Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Indonesia, Iran...
...It is the heart of a common program adopted by a wide range of peace groups who met in Washington last fall...
...Originally he had been scheduled to speak in Moscow at the end of the walk, but at the last moment the State Department declared Moscow off-limits for Russians...
...One question overrides all the others: who gets to call Palestine his own...
...Political acts have moral aspects, and it is a sign of civilization to try to keep them in mind, but justice is not the motor of history...
...But the thing which struck him most was the sharp division between the veterans who started out on the first day and the groups which joined later...
...Alan also said he now understood why protesters all looked like unkempt hippies...
...I thought about this on the drive back from Waterbury, Vermont, after listening to Yuri Kap-ralov skate over the differences between us and them...
...Each defends itself...
...I spent a lot of time on the 1920s and '30s, when Britain began to think better of the Balfour Declaration...
...I started with Theodor Herzl and the beginnings of the Zionist movement, when Palestine was often described as a kind of unpeopled wasteland...
...Q.: What about world revolution and the triumph of Communism...
...Finally I went to the Middle East and spent six weeks talking to people - not famous people but not quite ordinary people either, passionate partisans for both sides...
...It appeared they were totally free of all blame in the conflict, going right back to the 1880s...
...A.: What about Vietnam...
...A.: What about Martin Luther King...
...With all her faults she is my country still "The Farewell" Charles Churchill (1731-1764) THE OTHER DAY - it was a drizzly Saturday morning - I drove up to Montpelier, Vermont, with a friend, Virgil B., to join a group of several hundred marchers completing a three-day walk from one small Vermont (own, Washington, to another, Moscow...
...Q.: What about Afghanistan...
...It made me sick...
...A.: What about Sen...
...After his talk he answered questions from the audience...
...Bigger battalions are simply bigger battalions...
...Some of the things they have done stick in the craw, but what of it...
...And so on and so forth through all the wars, the rise of the Palestinians, the UN resolutions and the various peace initiatives, down to the present day...
...Whenever the group came to a likely body of water, for example, a group of young women immediately stripped and went swimming naked without apparent embarassment...
...The Israelis I listened to had all been in the army, had all fought in one or two wars, had all been wounded...
...We do not oppose and arm against the Russians because they have been found guilty in a formal proceeding conducted with strict respect for the rules of evidence...
...A.: What about Ngo Dinh Diem...
...What we have here, in short, is a case of apples and oranges...
Vol. 108 • September 1981 • No. 16
